When Ice Cube started up his own production company it made sense to leverage the first film he wrote to make a sequel. After all, most sequels are guaranteed to earn back a part of what their predecessors made. But without Chris Tucker and DJ Pooh, how does Cube handle taking Craig to the suburbs? Join us as we continue our series looking at the Friday franchise with Steve Carr’s 2000 film ‘Next Friday’.
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Ice Cube’s rap career was on fire because of the work he was doing with N.W.A., but after playing Doughboy in John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, he got the acting bug and wanted to do more films. Join us as we kick off our new series looking at the Friday franchise with F. Gary Gray’s 1995 film Friday.
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Toward the end of Grant’s acting career, he had stopped playing the romantic interest, concerned how his age reflected in the on-screen relationships, particularly with younger women. After this point, he only played a romantic interest one last time, and it was opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
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It’s the second in our Cary Grant series this week, and this time we’re heading straight up the Presidents’ noses as we follow Hitch and crew to Mt. Rushmore and beyond in the 1959 classic ‘North by Northwest’.
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Cary Grant knew Frank Capra was busy casting for his new film, an adaptation of the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace, and he knew that Ronald Reagan and Jack Benny had both turned the lead role down, so he told Capra he was interested and available. Capra was thrilled, and they set to work.
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With such a strong curriculum vitae in comedy films, having Jay Roach direct a remake of Francis Veber’s Le Dîner de Cons looks great on paper. But when it comes time to write, direct, and release the movie, does it hold up as well?
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Francis Veber had written plays, TV shows, and films. He had also directed plenty of well by the time he decided to adapt his hit play “Le Dîner de Cons” for the big screen. Luckily, his brand of farcical humor worked brilliantly with the film version, and it became a huge hit in his home country of France. Join us as we continue our Francis Veber & His Remakes series with his 1998 film “Le Dîner de Cons.”
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When Mike Nichols and Elaine May teamed up again for the first time in over thirty years, it was to adapt Francis Veber’s most famous and celebrated works, the 1978 film la Cage aux Folles. Veber’s films had been remade in English before – in fact, he’d directed a number of them – but this one was the big one so it needed to be big.
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When asked to adapt the hit stage show “La Cage Aux Folles” to the big screen, director Édouard Molinaro knew he had to get comedy writer/director Francis Veber involved to not only get the story out of the one-set show and open up the world, but also — and more importantly — to flesh out the core relationship so the film wasn’t just all stereotypes.
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Is this an activist film? How does this film fit in director Agnieszka Holland’s oeuvre? Does magical realism work in a crime drama? Tune in to this week’s show to get answers to these questions and more.
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